Appalshop Workshop

Exciting news! The Chamber has partnered with the Trent Hills Creative Matrix to bring Appalshop to Trent Hills. A special session will be hosted for the business community.
"Art- and culture-driven development" means a lot more than trinkets and tourism. Done properly, art and culture can unbound a community's imagination and catalyze citizens' capacity to recognize latent assets and turn them into community wealth. In this workshop, Ben Fink of Appalshop (Kentucky, USA) will explain how his neighbors in the Appalachian coalfields are working through art and culture to unbound their imaginations and awaken new assets, distill this work into a set of workable principles and practices, and lead participants through an interactive series of exercises to explore how these principles could be applied here.
Appalshop believes that every community has latent talents they can turn into new community wealth if they can unbind their imaginations and tell new stories about themselves. Appalshop is hosting sessions in Trent Hills to bring together area businesses, creative entrepreneurs and event organizers for informal, interactive workshops to engage with Appalshop’s 50 years of experience in community capacity building. Since 1969, Appalshop has been enacting cultural organizing and place-based media, arts and education to document the life, celebrate the culture, and voice the concerns of people living in Appalachia and rural America. They help reimagine their region by bringing forth new and often unheard voices and visions from the people of this place and demonstrating the power of arts and culture to create meaningful social and economic change.